Tuesday night was so action-packed, I didn’t even get a chance to dissect here the Irvine City Council’s response to the grand jury report critical of Great Park governance.

First of all, the three-member majority’s attempt to pooh-pooh the report was a foregone conclusion, so all that really remained was to see whether the debate might provide some classic Agran-Krom moments. They didn’t disappoint.

Practically the first words out of Mayor Beth Krom‘s mouth took issue with Steven Choi‘s statement that he was “ashamed” about the Grand Jury report – and Krom’s words spewed forth in a single sentence that contains a magnificent dependent clause deserving countywide notoriety.

In case you start getting lost, I spent some time locating what I believe to be the underlying embedded sentence – “it is frustrating” – and it begins at word No. 104 of this 123-word lesson in cogent thought.

“I will say, however, that when a grand jury indicates its intention to do an investigation and in the process one discovers that one knows nothing about who initiated the investigation and can never know anything about who initiated the investigation, one knows nothing about who testified before the grand jury and can never know who testified before the grand jury and the City of Irvine and the Great Park Corporation Board in deference to the city – to the grand jury – provided copious amounts of information to the grand jury, much of which does not appear to have been relevant to their investigation, it is frustrating, and I will simply say to my colleague, Councilmember Choi, that I’m sorry that he feels ashamed.”

A little later, she displayed the pettiness and inconsistency for which she’s famous. For example, when her co-conspirator, Sukhee Kang, called for “a big round of applause” for all the hard work the Great Park Board has done (and got only an embarrassing smattering from the packed house), she was OK with that. (In fairness, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that the Great Park Board has done a tremendous amount of good in the last year. It’s just that all that means diddly in the court of public opinion when you continue to make the blunders it does regarding sole-source contracts and other oversight issues.)

A couple of hours later, however, when a statement by Choi about needing to restore confidence in the city drew big applause, Krom asked the audience as a “courtesy” that the clapping cease.

Of course,Irvine meeting would be complete without Larry Agran giving us ignorant country folk a lesson in government, geo-politics or some such thing, and I was fortunate enough to still be in the room when he launched into what he called “a Civics 101 lesson.”

I must have missed the syllabus, but in a segment he might have called, “The Dual Roles of the Grand Jury and How the Media Deliberately Confuses Them,” Agran patiently walked us ignoramuses through the mind-blowing concept that that the grand jury, in addition to its criminal indictment function, also performs “civil inquiries.”

“It’s not an investigation that implies wrongdoing,” he asserted.

How true. It was an investigation that simply implied the lack of fair and balanced governance of $400 million in public funds. Yeah, come to think of it, I’d be shining the grand jury myself. So glad I came to class today.

The one new wrinkle I saw in Agran this week is that he’s dropped any pretense of letting bygones be bygones with the county.

Reacting to the grand jury’s recommendation that the Great Park board be expanded to include more people from outside Irvine (which Agran wrongly characterized as the Board of Supervisors trying take over the Great Park Board), he bitterly maintained that the board already “extracted its pound of flesh” when it forced Irvine to give the county 120 acres of the parkland during the annexation process.

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